Companies Team Up to Create Award-Winning Casting | Latest News | insightonbusiness.com

Two Wisconsin-based companies, Amerequip and Waupaca Foundry, recently teamed up to create a metal casting that’s creating a buzz in the commercial lawn, landscape and agricultural markets.

A cast iron bucket attachment, for a compact utility tractor, just received the America Foundry Society’s Casting of the Year Award. In the past, bucket attachments were made from fabricated steel and the bucket teeth were sourced from China. But with today’s international supply chain challenges, Amerequip was searching for a way to meet the equipment needs of their clients while working around the supply chain issues. The company turned to Waupaca Foundry for assistance.

The result was an innovative, redesigned bucket attachment for compact backhoes, the first cast iron bucket attachment on the market. Not only was the bucket designed and manufactured here in Wisconsin, so were the cast iron teeth for the bucket. That means the teeth no longer need to be imported from China.

Tim Dorn, vice president of sales and engineering at Amerequip stated, “We are growing and needed to find a solution to supply chain issues that were hampering our ability to continue growing. While we knew there were opportunities for casting the bucket, we wanted to make sure it was done right by working with a company that was innovative and experienced. That’s why we turned to Waupaca Foundry.”

Not only did Amerequip and Waupaca Foundry engineer a bucket design that could be produced as an iron casting, but they also improved the bucket by making it slightly wider and added a taper to the bucket design allowing the material to come out of the bucket easier.

“This design exceeded our expectations,” added Dorn. “We can now cast the entire part and meet our customer demands. I can’t say enough about the solutions-based creativity exhibited by the Waupaca Foundry team.”